


Sid Gets Older (And Grows Up, Too)

by faithful4you



Category: Toy Story (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithful4you/pseuds/faithful4you
Summary: I tried my best for my Yuletider. It was difficult to try to find the voice of a younger kid (how does JK Rowling do it so well?!). Great prompt and I hope I brought you some holiday joy.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Sid Gets Older (And Grows Up, Too)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dancinbutterfly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/gifts).

> I tried my best for my Yuletider. It was difficult to try to find the voice of a younger kid (how does JK Rowling do it so well?!). Great prompt and I hope I brought you some holiday joy.

Sid is 11 years old when everything he thought he knew about the world gets thrown out the window, run over by a semi, lit on fire, and then the ashes put on a rocket shot to the moon.

Toys are somehow alive and they are angry with him. He thinks about that when he sits in class and stares out the window, imagining what the toys are doing while he's away. Wonders if they are trying to get out. They are locked in a box under his bed where he had chucked them. Every single one he had been able to find, except the Woody and Buzz Lightyear. He doesn't know where they went but he just hopes they don't ever come back.

It's been days since he's had a good night's rest. He has panda tired eyes, heavy and near impossible to keep open. His mom had taken a good long look at him earlier and thought he was falling sick and that he shouldn't go to school tomorrow. She told him to get to bed early and had looked surprised when he hadn't protested. He desperately wants to, but he fights sleep all the same. He can still see it. Him.

The Sheriff Woody doll with his boots and spurs, denim jeans, cow print vest with the badge neatly pinned, and his hand-stitched polyvinyl cowboy hat. Reach for the sky. There's a snake in my boot. Somebody's poisoned the waterhole. Blank expression and yet there was the doll saying his name. Saying his name. Woody's head, marred by the mark left from the sun and the magnifying glass, turning completely around. Castigating him for his years of mistreatment of his apparently sentient toys. 

Toys that had been watching him all along. When he went to bed. When he woke up. When he raced into his room eager to take them apart and re-assemble them with mismatched parts. Toys that had feelings about what he had done to them. Did it hurt them when he clamped them down in his vise and twisted off their arms, their legs, their heads?

The thought makes his stomach twist and he turns over to face the other way. Tears prick at his eyes. He is hyper aware of the locked box underneath him. The guilt wrapped around him makes him feel like he's in a vise.

He bolts upright and jumps out of the bed. The toys – they had feelings. He knows how to begin saying he's sorry.

Sid tugs the box out from under the bed and gives it a cautious shake. He can hear the toys slide around inside. He bites the inside of his cheek. The last thing in the world he wants to do is open this box but he has to do it.

He quickly thumbs the combination, opens the lock and lid in one motion, and jumps back. 

He waits. And waits. And waits.

Nothing happens.

He nudges the box with his foot. He feels stupid doing it, but manages to eek out a weak, “Hello?”

No answer.

He gathers every ounce of bravery and looks into the box. Every toy in there doesn't move or talk or blink. The doll with the pterodactyl head lies slumped in a corner. The baby head on the mechanical arms looks blankly upwards. The paratrooper glued to the skateboard, the cars with the animal legs, the half He-Man on a spring. Nothing looks like it is remotely alive but he swears he can still feel them seeing him with their unmoving eyes.

He picks up the ruin of Hannah's doll. “I'm sorry for what I did and I'm going to try to fix you,” he says and tries not to cry.

Sid works the whole night, taking each toy in hand, apologizing and vowing to fix them. He finishes just before the sun comes up. 

Each toy sits on the workbench – every mismatched Frankenstein part put back on the right body. The only hiccup had the paratrooper – first getting him unglued from the skateboard. He worked at it for ages until he had finally separated them, only to realize he couldn't find the trooper's legs. Then, he got the idea to seat him in the cockpit of a WWII fighter plane model which he figured had to be kind of an upgrade from the accessory-less plastic box he had come in.

When he finally falls asleep and wakes up nearly at dinnertime, he is half relieved and maybe more than half else (if that's possible) alarmed when every single toy has an arm raised as if in greeting.

***

Even if it feels like he has made amends and his apologies accepted, he donates all his toys to a preschool later that summer. He wouldn't be able to play with them like they deserved, and they should have a fresh start with kids that weren't in any way like him. 

He doesn't buy any new ones.

***

He's 23 - a garbage man by day and a fifth-year business admin student by night, and life isn't easy but it's good. His family is split but happy. It took two broken ribs and a desperate ambulance ride, but his mom finally left his father, just after The Great Revelation as he has come to call it. She teaches part-time at a high school. The art teacher has been dancing around asking her out for weeks and she is going to ask him herself if it doesn't happen soon. Hannah is interning at a publishing house that will probably fight tooth and nail to keep her once she graduates. She paints on the side and travels to more countries than her shoestring budget should allow. He doesn't know much about his father these days.

He has a beautiful red-haired girl named Merida who laughs easy with him, kisses him with a smile, and likes to dance as much as he likes to listen to music. She has three wild brothers who idolize him for some strange reason. His most pressing worry right now is whether he'll have enough cash so they can road trip it down to South Padre for Spring Break.

He still feels like a kid and so it's totally OK to reach into the fridge for a Caprisun. That's when his girlfriend tells him he's going to have a kid. 

***

He doesn't know what to say so he stands there like an idiot with his head in the fridge.

She waits, she shouts, she leaves.

He has no words.

***

It takes him some time to find the words. A day longer to figure out how to act on them. He tells himself enough is enough and grits his teeth, gets in his truck, and sets off determined. 

It's not that he grew up and now swears that The Great Revelation had never happened. His toys were alive, animate somehow. He was chastised and set straight by a cowboy doll that talked and turned its head all the way round Exorcist-style. The experience sprouted a conscience and he suddenly had deep empathy. He'd fixed them, gained their forgiveness, and then donated them to be played with by better, normal kids. 

He is sure of all of this and yet he can feel sweat build at his hairline. His hands feel clammy and stiff, his grip tight around the wheel. His breath is uneven and he has to consciously repeat in his mind in out in out in out. 

He's a wreck in the parking lot of Al's Toy Barn. Hannah would flat out laugh at him if she could see him right now. It's not like he hasn't been in a superstore before. He has to get the hell out of his truck and get going.

“Jingle balls,” he says aloud and blows air forcefully out of the corner of his mouth. “Man up and get out of the truck.”

He prys himself out of his seat and makes a beeline for the store. The automatic doors closing behind make him feel ridiculously trapped.

***

He ends up finding him in the Rare & Discontinued aisle. 

A Sheriff Woody with his boots and spurs, denim jeans, cow print vest with the badge neatly pinned, and his hand-stitched polyvinyl cowboy hat. Reach for the sky. There's a snake in my boot. Somebody's poisoned the waterhole. You're my favorite deputy.

He is going to tell Merida this – that he knows he can be a good dad who can grow a good person. That this toy taught him what kindness means, and how yes that sounds a little odd but it's true. That he wants to try to put that into words that a tiny human might understand. He will teach them the best he knows how and he'll be imperfect but he'll try.

***

He turns 24 and his little girl decides she wants to share his birthday.


End file.
